Geospatial Industry Outlook 2009: Survive and Thrive in a Changing World

Conducted by the GeoWorld Magazine Editorial Board, the GeoSpatial Industry Outlook 2009 : Surve and Thrive in a Changing World, is published (here). My personal humble opinion can be found from there. As the Board has reached over 22 leaders and experts in the geospatial industry, this is an excellent assembling of collective intelligence.

Q: Where do you think the next unique and widespread adoption of geotechnology will take place?

[Tao] Geospatial technology is being integrated into the mainstream of information and communication technology (ICT). As the use of ICT is very broad, we will see increasing developments in location-enabled applications. Geospatial technology will become an intrinsic and often invisible part of everyday personal and business uses. In short, the widespread adoption of geotechnology will take place wherever the ICT lies.

The geospatial industry has come a long way. It’s now a multi-billion-dollar industry with location-based services leading the way. Personal navigation devices have reached the status of an established mobile device category, similar to digital cameras and MP3 players.

With increasing investments by major ICT players (e.g., Microsoft, Google and Nokia) as well as increasing adoption by mobile carriers, mobile location-based services will experience a rapid growth in the next two to five years. Among geospatial applications, this is perhaps the fastest-growing sector in terms of user base and revenue projection.

The emergence of local search, either from PCs or mobile devices, accompanied by location-based advertising or commerce, offers an attractive business model that’s impacting the industry value chain from carriers to customers and from content providers to solution developers.

Although the industry is transforming from a hardware-and-software structure to a content-and-services structure, there’s a long way to go before any business enjoys the market maturity and profitability. We should expect consolidations and causalities along the path toward this direction.

As more users traverse, communicate in and even shop in virtual worlds, it’s not unrealistic to think of performing these activities in mirrored worlds built using photo-realistic models. Location will be part of your “virtual life.” We’re at the nascent stage in terms of technology and business models, but it certainly would be disruptive when we come to this era.

If you are interested in the 2008 edition “Industry Outlook 2008: Peering through the Looking Glass”, you can find them at Geospatial Outlook 2008 and Vincent’s Outlook 2008.